It kind of amazes me that no one seems to be formatting with hanging indents, which is what print publishers do with lines that are too long for a printed page. There are even protocols for hanging indents for long lines when some of the lines are indented (usually less of an indent). There's actually a whole listserv devoted to w3 specifications for poetry, but none of the people there seem to have heard about the hanging indent either (it is a tab / spacing problem that is difficult to conquer).
Sticking with images (scans), like google ebooks still do, works for me -- you can magnify them or shrink them if the size is tough, and the text isn't altered. Admittedly, I like to have both -- the image, unaltered, of the page, and full access to all the letters. But I don't have a problem with the "artifact of the codex" for poetry. I mean, if they are art works, they're images anyway, and one of those things that's supposed to distinguish poetry is its *intended* appearance....
I have retitled this blog I started more than 10 years ago to indicate the contents are opinions. I have temporarily returned to the "web log" style here. I am not seeking to market (see lack of tags), nor to "vent."
3.12.2011
3.06.2011
thinking briefly on annie finch's idea of "multiformalism" this morning, together with my idea of "transposition"
in systems (and a poem is a little system, or a piece of one (if it is a serial poem, say), or a version or release or iteration of one), one thing you have to consider is the formalism of your approach to the system; if it is a little poem, will it bludgeon it to death and cost a lot of irrelevant effort and overhead to use a very formal process, or will something important occur as the output?
well, in this case, learning how to make a system properly is a good -- if you're writing the poem to learn to write poems, then a certain amount of formalism may be a benefit -- not immediately but to systems down the line -- but in a piece of something else, you want just the right amount of formalism -- never done a use case, and got some hairy reqs? do the cases, and see where the chips fall -- or shlep the cases through the process if they've been getting abandoned as early lifecycle decoration during data modelling --
so, too, ... lost track
opportunities for disruption and variation seem -- not just offered by form by also by semantics, by grammar, by subject matter (being multidimensional)
in systems (and a poem is a little system, or a piece of one (if it is a serial poem, say), or a version or release or iteration of one), one thing you have to consider is the formalism of your approach to the system; if it is a little poem, will it bludgeon it to death and cost a lot of irrelevant effort and overhead to use a very formal process, or will something important occur as the output?
well, in this case, learning how to make a system properly is a good -- if you're writing the poem to learn to write poems, then a certain amount of formalism may be a benefit -- not immediately but to systems down the line -- but in a piece of something else, you want just the right amount of formalism -- never done a use case, and got some hairy reqs? do the cases, and see where the chips fall -- or shlep the cases through the process if they've been getting abandoned as early lifecycle decoration during data modelling --
so, too, ... lost track
opportunities for disruption and variation seem -- not just offered by form by also by semantics, by grammar, by subject matter (being multidimensional)
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